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Not everyone knows to deal with conflicts or crises very well.
They happen all the time, some with higher stakes than others, but the
rules for negotiating them remain pretty much the same
Not
everyone knows to deal with conflicts or crises very well. They happen
all the time, some with higher stakes than others, but the rules for
negotiating them remain pretty much the same
When faced with a critical situation, the immediate human reaction
can go either one of two ways: they may act quickly, calmly and
effectively — or they may demonstrate what someone who’s ‘lost it’ looks
like in person.
Crises come in many forms, the more serious ones ranging from hostage
situations and life-threatening emergencies to boardroom battles and
marital splits. While many would gladly opt to stay well away from
conflict (in any of its forms, whether their own or others’), there are a
few crisis negotiators who regularly take on the mantle of walking that
fine middle line in the hopes of finding a favourable resolution to
all. We speak to a few folks who have learned to battle the high stakes
and still play it cool.

“Don’t be a hostage”
It’s true that extreme circumstances may sometimes be the best way to
confront one’s true potential. American citizen George Kohlrieser
certainly discovered his the first time he got taken hostage. The
experience was traumatic but it paved the way for a career as a clinical
psychologist that includes 35 years as a hostage negotiator. His story
of how that came to be is far more personal than most and, as you may
have guessed, a little extreme.FORGING BONDS: George Kohlrieser warns we can be taken hostage without weapons, if not careful
He’d signed up to participate in a domestic violence protection
programme right after grad school, and on one of the days when he was
driving around with the police, they got a distress call from a local
hospital, where a “psychotic man was holding a nurse hostage”. A quick
assessment of the situation told the lieutenant in charge there was only
one option: someone had to go in. “To my surprise, it was me he asked,”
George narrates. “But I agreed and went in. The man wasn’t happy to see
me and, within a few minutes, had cut the nurse’s throat (though not
her jugular).”
He quickly took George hostage with a pair of scissors at his throat.
But after an extended negotiation of about 20-30 minutes, George had
managed to convince him to give up the nurse, the scissors — and
himself. He puts it down to the emotional bond he managed to form with
his captor: “At one point, I’d asked him how he wanted his children to
remember him. With rage, he shouted: “Don’t talk about my kids. In fact,
get them here; I’ll kill them too!” It wasn’t a rational answer but it
was an answer to my question — the first one. In fact, he did love his
kids. We later learnt the whole scene was a result of getting into a
fight with his ex-wife after he broke a court order to see the kids.”
George got taken hostage three more times after this (these things
happen) but it was the first incident that changed his life for good.
Currently a professor of Leadership and Organisational Behaviour at
reputed business school IMD in Switzerland, the 67-year-old is not
involved in direct hostage negotiation today but teaches many of the
same negotiation techniques as applicable to everyday living. “The fact
is you can be a hostage without weapons — to a boss, to ideas, to
children, spouses, in-laws etc,” he states. “But the same techniques we
use in hostage negotiation can be used in those situations where you’re
psychologically held hostage, powerless or entrapped.”
He encourages building bridges but draws the line at being taken
hostage. “Learn to say no without offending the other person. Learn to
tolerate conflict and talk your way through the differences. A hostage
negotiator’s best tool is not a gun — but his words and how they’re
used. You must be master of your own fate.”

Corporate techniques
Crises are nothing new to Washington-based Christopher Voss, whose
cool negotiation style caused some colleagues to dub it as “very Zen”
during his seven-year tenure as lead kidnapping negotiator at the FBI.
The former special agent spent a total of 24 years in the agency’s
service and worked in excess of 150 kidnapping cases while there, but it
was the botched rescue attempt of the 2001 Burnham-Sobero case
(American missionaries and citizen who’d been kidnapped by the Abu
Sayyaf group) that made him step back and change his entire outlook on
things.ACE NEGOTIATOR: Christopher Voss has adapted several techniques they used in hostage crises for the corporate world
“It was the first time I’d worked a case where people got killed,
especially when we thought they were going to be released towards the
end. It was probably the worst professional moment in my career and a
pretty low point in my personal life too when I got called in the
morning and got told that Martin Burnham had been killed. That’s when I
wanted to understand the dynamics of what had happened. I vowed to
myself I’d never let that happen again.”
Christopher ended up on the Harvard Law School negotiation course,
where he rediscovered techniques they’d “already known but whose power
they didn’t entirely realise”. He left the FBI in 2007 and eventually
opened his own firm of negotiation experts called The Black Swan Group
that has adapted crisis negotiation techniques for the business world.
In other words, he posits that several techniques learned on the front
lines of negotiation in international kidnapping crises can go a long
way to making or breaking deals in the corporate world — if you know to
use them.
For example, most people go into a negotiation looking to ‘win’.
“That’s short term thinking,” he contends. “You can cut someone’s throat
in a bargain and win every last dollar on the table but those people
are never going to want to talk to you again. What’s more, your
reputation precedes you so no one will make good deals with you. No one
complains about doing business with Warren Buffet because those who do
prosper. That’s the sort of negotiator you want to be.”
While there are many qualities to a good negotiator, Christopher, who
is also an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University McDonough
School of Business today, considers integrity paramount to success.
“First off, most people that take hostages are generally really good
liars anyway,” he says. Likewise, even in the corporate world, the
consultant says some of the best businessmen he knows often ask their
counterparts set-up questions to begin with so they know clearly later
on when they’re being lied to. And that would just be a deal-breaker.

Help on the line
When Mumbai-based Johnson Thomas received a call a few months back
from a compatriot in Milan threatening suicide by poison, the
37-year-old coolly allowed the distressed caller to vent his
frustrations till eventually, he calmed down, listened as Johnson
reasoned with him and, finally, ended the call after promising to get in
touch if he felt unable to handle the pressure again. Random, you say?
Not at all. That call was just one of over three lakh calls that
Johnson’s 24-hour suicide prevention hotline Aasra has received over the
last 14 years. Well, 3,15,434 calls as of last week, to be unnervingly
precise.PATIENT LISTENER: Johnson Thomas helped found Aasra as a suicide prevention hotline in 1998
A freelance journalist and film critic by profession, Johnson founded
the helpline in 1998 after one of his students from the orphanage he
taught at after college in those days committed suicide. “I met a lot of
kids who were disturbed, distressed and suicidal there,” he recalls.
“But maybe if I’d paid a little more attention to that student, he might
still be alive today.” The tragedy spurred him to contact international
charity Befrienders Worldwide/Samaritans, and together with some
like-minded individuals, Aasra was born.
The number of callers has jumped greatly since the service first
began. But years on, he admits you still never know what you’re going to
get with a caller today. They range from as young as 10-year-olds
wanting to take their lives to 75-year-olds too weary to go on. No
matter what their profile, each caller gets a patient, listening ear –
the oldest, most effective disarming technique to date. “We’ve learned
they don’t really want to end their lives… just somehow kill the pain
they’re experiencing. So we provide complete emotional support and aim
to lower their tensions to the point where we can get them to think of
options other than suicide.”
It’s not a job for everyone, Johnson concedes. “You need to have the
innate ability to empathise with these callers because if you can’t, you
won’t be able to adapt to the repertoire [of distressed callers and
their issues]. The idea is to stay calm and allow them to express
themselves without judgement or criticism.” And that works across the
board — whether you’re a parent, sibling or friend.

When love has lost…
The honeymoon period is over and the strains are starting to show. At
times, it’s on decades of marital… togetherness that the curtains are
set to close. It’s when the legal route is inevitable that family law
solicitor Alexandra Tribe steps in to mediate the process.MEDIATOR: When things go sour in a marriage, Alexandra Tribe steps in to ease the legal process
The 36-year-old Briton, who trained as a resolution accredited
specialist before moving to Dubai in 2007 and establishing the
Expatriate Law division at Al Rowaad Advocates, says her first advice to
feuding couples is always to reconsider. “Since I’ve been in Dubai,
I’ve probably divorced about 300 expats, about 20-30 per cent of which
end up in court,” she notes. “The remaining are dealt with amicably
through negotiations so that a court decision isn’t required.”
If the couple insist on calling it quits, the negotiations — so
integral to keep things from turning ugly — begin. “It’s very common,
when parties separate, for emotions to run high. They often don’t want
to speak to each other so that’s where I get involved, negotiating so
that the transition is smooth, especially if there are children
involved.” The division of financial and marital assets are one thing,
but Alexandra finds there’s often a lot of anxiety about what will
happen with the kids. “If an agreement about the children is reached
early on, other financial compromises tend to be easier to sort.”
Quarrels can get petty and trivial, with both parties using their
solicitors to trade stingers. But that is a game Alexandra is not too
keen to play. “I have to remind them to take a step back and focus on
the important issues otherwise costs will unnecessarily escalate and
there’ll be more hostility between the two,” she explains. “I often find
the husband/wife want to use me as a voice for their anger, which is
inappropriate since I’m there to resolve the problem...”
With so much hostility to deal with every day, it’s only inevitable
for things to get to the professional at times as well. “Clients are
understandably upset and emotional when they come to see me, and I
always have a box of tissues on my desk. It’s quite hard but I see my
job as resolving the problem so I try not to get too swept up in the
happenings and focus on reaching a good outcome for them as soon as
possible so they can move on with their lives.”

Facing the fire
A fire fighter by profession for the last 17 years, Fujairah-based
Pieter Smit says he is “in negotiations” all the time. From trying to
convince an old South African lady to leave the house that was burning
down around her (“it was all she had left”) to coaxing trapped cats out
of elevator shafts and poisonous snakes out of residences (“we negotiate
with animals too”), the South African national has probably done it
all.TO THE RESCUE: Pieter Smit (left) with fellowfire fighters during a water rescue training session in Saudi Arabia
The 36-year-old first started as a volunteer at school before landing
a permanent position at the local fire department then moving on to
work with the UN mission in Congo and the King Abdullah University for
Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. Currently the lead fire fighter
at oil and gas company ADCO, Pieter says negotiation skills are critical
in his line of work because “firemen usually find people at their worst
— when their property has been destroyed or family members are in grave
danger… Everything is chaos and nobody’s thinking straight.”
Some of the most trying situations, however, involve crowd control
more than search-and-rescue, he feels. “People want you to help them but
in some situations, it’s just too dangerous. Sometimes, a building may
be in danger of collapse and you have to remove all the emergency
workers from the area. The public doesn’t always understand why the fire
fighters are, at that stage, standing back and doing nothing.” Though
he and his team try to explain the situation calmly to those distraught,
Pieter admits they often bear the brunt of a lot of fiery tempers too.
“You have to be patient with them,” he reasons. “It comes with a
fireman’s temperament. That’s why I always say: firemen are born, not
made.”
Of all the negotiations he’s been part of, perhaps none were as
interesting as when there were cultural mores to consider during those
perilous operations as well. Take the 2009 Jeddah floods, he says. The
country’s worst floods raged almost two metres high, destroying many
homes and sweeping away thousands of vehicles. “There we were trying to
get people out of houses but all the women had locked themselves up
inside. Due to the local custom, they couldn’t speak to us either.” How
did they manage? “Very carefully!” he laughs. “Thankfully, the security
guards helped us explain... You still had to wait for them to put
theiron — but times like these, you just go with the flow!”
Everyone deals with some form of crisis everyday. The point is,
whether in the bedroom, the boardroom or the courtroom, neither
aggression nor non-resistance will help. It’s all about finding middle
ground.